Filmmaker James Costa serves up lunch critique

Filmmaker James Costa has a new film out about the poor state of school lunch programs in the United States and has a message for those who snark at first lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign: Back off.

“What are they promoting, for us to be unhealthy?” said Costa, the director behind “Lunch Hour.” “I think she’s doing the best job that she possibly can. That anybody is attacking her, to me, is insanity. It’s just absolute madness.”

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The film, which gets released Tuesday via iTunes and Amazon, features politicians (Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York) and reporters (USA Today’s Peter Eisler) weighing in on the sad state of school lunches and, while Costa says that schools and parents need to step up their efforts to improve food quality, so, too, does Washington.

“Our hope is the movie will get people active in their schools and, when they see it, then they’re going to put demands on their representatives and leaders and principals and things like that so that it goes back up the ladder in Washington to say, ‘We need to put more money into healthy schools.’” Costa says that the organization in charge of many of these decisions — the U.S.D.A. — is in an odd spot.

“They’re telling us what should be on the menu and then promoting the food industry. It’s a situation where they have to do two jobs and please both parties and I think we have to maybe have more dieticians deciding what goes on.”

Not that he’s all that optimistic, however.

“I’m hopeful and then sort of depressed, but then I don’t let it get to me. When you read about schools that introduce healthy foods and then they pulled it because they said the kids weren’t eating it, it’s like, you can’t just give up on it in a week. These kids are addicted to these unhealthy foods, so to expect that we’ll all just be, like, ‘Okay, we’ll eat this in three weeks’ is really not taking the issue seriously.”